Aerial View
Since October 2018, we have been working with members of the Iowa (or Ioway or Bah Kho-je) Tribe of Oklahoma, hoping in the long run to help create and curate a digital archive for the tribe’s language, songs, stories, and culture. Scholars in the field of rhetoric can practice decoloniality by using university resources to sustain Indigenous knowledges and cultural practices. The multimodal installation we construct here presents various moments key to the process of this work—some pieces connecting directly to the Iowa Tribe and other pieces showing a larger Indigenous cultural ecology as it unfolded to us. This installation is based on a community-engaged project in its earliest stages and begins in exploring and building our relationship to this land, the Indigenous peoples who have inhabited and continue to inhabit it, and to each other as scholars and colleagues.
Our installation is comprised of seven videos and placards respectively titled “Prayer” and “Process” on their corresponding entry pages, as well as seven audio recordings of Cherokee pronunciations. We decided to audio record our learning and use of the language—located at the beginning of each video and on the pronunciation page—with Cherokee elder and language teacher Charles Foster, emphasizing the crucial role of Indigenous elders in sustaining tribal languages and cultures. As our project with the Iowa also relies upon the knowledge of elders, these audio recordings with Mr. Foster reflect the critical reliance on elders in tribal community settings and resonate with archival recordings of elder Frank Murray’s Iowa language classes in the Prayer for the direction Galvladidla. Some of our Process placards are academic prose that provide a brief account of Oklahoma and Indigenous history; other Process placards offer stories about our embodied experiences in this project. As many scholars of color, particularly Indigenous scholars (Anzaldúa; Maracle; Royster; Powell, et al.; Womack; Teuton; Bruchac; Kovach; Archibald; Wilson), have demonstrated, stories operate as theories, methods, and practices. In many Indigenous cultures, stories operate as agentive beings and provide an embodied way to engage the world and connect with other human and non-human beings. They make space, inscribe locations, and establish cultural ecologies when practiced in a place. The videos we have included as Prayers acknowledge how stories also work in Indigenous epistemologies to connect humans with larger, creative forces beyond our ultimate understanding. Stories always have an origin.
Origin Story
Stories nourish identities and create relationships. Stories accumulate to create a larger story. Stories can enrich us as well as overwhelm us. Stories, or how stories are told, or whose stories are told, can also silence, neglect, dismiss people and their lives; they can also uplift, amplify, and attend to people and their lives. Stories are always cultural, defining and inscribing groups, peoples, and nations. As Cherokee Rhetoric and Composition scholar Ellen Cushman explains, stories “operate by relocating meaning in the context of its unfolding that opposes the imperial archive’s penchant for collecting, classifying and isolating” (116). Stories work “through the co-construction of knowledge based on interactions between storytellers and listeners,” defying the authority of experts (Cushman 116-117). Stories come in many forms and mediums and work on multiple levels. Origin stories often include narratives of first contacts. Our initial contact with the Iowa began with Rachel making a solo trip to their tribal complex in October 2018:
I remember driving onto the tribal complex of the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma for the first time. I am an Indigenous woman and a Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma citizen. My research has been community-engaged for over a decade. I make friends easily. Yet, I enter new Indigenous spaces with anxiety, and this is mainly because I want to feel and demonstrate respect in the right way. I want to listen and hear deeply. This is how you build relationships.
When I first went into the Iowa Tribal Library to introduce myself and speak with the librarian, I noticed an image on the wall behind her door. I stood and looked at it in silence for a long moment, my eyes searching for familiar patterns and struggling to find them. It looked like art to me, almost like a beading pattern drawn out and enlarged. I did not ask what it was, but rather waited to see if the librarian would explain on her own terms. Asking too many questions too soon can be off-putting, and I already had a long list of questions to ask.
“That’s No Heart’s Map,” the librarian told me.
“No Heart?” I asked, showing my ignorance.
“Yes. He used it in negotiations with the federal government sometime in the early 1800s. He made it to show them our territory.”
“It’s a map?”
“Yes, and he drew it.”
I’d never seen a map drawn by an Indigenous person before. Maps are drawn by imperialist explorers and settler colonialists. I remember feeling eager to tell Phil, to talk about No Heart’s map with a colleague who would be as amazed as I was, and to make sense of it together.
Prior to beginning the project in October, our (Rachel and Phil’s) relationship began in August 2018 when we were both new faculty members in the Department of English at Oklahoma State University (OSU). We met at the New Faculty Orientation and almost immediately started discussing ideas about research, teaching, and community engagement. Originally from Oklahoma, an Indigenous woman, and a Native Studies scholar, Rachel already had strong research experience and publications on Oklahoma cultures and histories. Rachel also had many relationships with tribal cultural workers across the state. Phil, on the other hand, had moved to Tulsa that summer from Lansing, Michigan, and had no connections to the people or land of his new home. By the end of the two-week orientation, we established a relationship that would involve connecting with the Iowa Tribe in Perkins, Oklahoma, hoping to collaborate with tribal members to identify their assets and needs for sustaining cultural literacy.
Working from initial interactions with Iowa tribal members and using Rachel’s previous work with the Kiowa community as an example, we co-envisioned a living digital archive of elders speaking the language and sharing songs and stories. Phil was invested in developing relationships with the people of this land and their histories, particularly those marginalized and silenced by settler coloniality. Our relationship offered an ideal fit for two new colleagues invested in decolonial practice, and relationships between our story and other stories began to become clear. The Decolonial Directions project has helped us imagine and create these connections.
Relationships and Rivers
Rivers provide water, which sustains all earthly life and draws us into relationship with places and peoples. Rivers, unless dammed, continually move. Rivers make pathways in the earth, shape the landscape, and create points of reference. Rivers transport people, goods, wildlife, and sediments to other spaces and places. Rivers create and sustain an ecological system, bringing basic sustenance to soils and plant life at the micro level while also being part of a macro ecology. They create a matrix, connecting to each other on a grand scale. Rivers contract and expand. They swell and flood, sometimes drowning out and destroying habitats, and other times (or at the same time) providing nourishment and opportunity for new growth. Rivers enrich the soil, providing nutrients for flora, fauna, and humans. Rivers cause migration—when a river dries up or floods, human and non-human life moves away from its banks. Rivers also attract humans and non-humans; they move humans and non-humans to them. Indigenous peoples, as No Heart’s map demonstrates, have lived by and with rivers for centuries.
No Heart’s map quickly became a centerpiece of our project. We went back to it multiple times as an orienting object for foregrounding Indigenous epistemologies and histories. Na’je Niŋe (translated fully as “No Heart of Fear”), the brother of Chief White Cloud, led Iowa members to D.C. in 1837 to negotiate a land agreement with the U.S. government. On his map, No Heart included three key markers: rivers, trails, and village sites. The map shows no borders or boundaries, and this makes it difficult, in the present day, to determine the expanse of land that the map represents. Though No Heart included rivers which spanned contemporary state and territorial boundaries, he did not include these boundaries but rather illustrated his own cultural and epistemological relationship to the land. This relationship begins with water, made clear by the rivers’ centrality in the map. The Iowa trails and village sites follow the rivers’ paths. As No Heart’s map illustrates the Iowa relationship to water via the rivers, it also centers our relationship with the Iowa.
In Cherokee culture, water is a sacred element. For Cherokees, water is life and also medicine. Water has power. In the southeastern part of what is now called the United States, ancient mound-building cultures associated water with the Below World—a place of disorder, danger, and mystery. The Cherokee, Muscogee Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole inherited the mound-builders’ culture and relationship to water. The Decolonial Directions project and installation, though focused at first on the Iowa, also engages the histories and cultures of these southeastern tribes for several reasons. Most obviously, Rachel is Cherokee and brings her cultural perspective to the project. Secondly, as a penultimate example of settler colonialism, Oklahoma’s history began as Indian Territory. Typically understood as beginning with the 1830 Indian Removal Act (though arguably starting earlier in the 1820s), the United States federal government relocated and/or contained over 40 tribes to Indian Territory prior to Oklahoma’s statehood in 1907. Finally, the project also includes Kiowa history and culture. Because of Rachel’s longstanding community-engagement with the Kiowa people, her work with the Kiowa serves as a model for our project with the Iowa. The Kiowa, along with several other tribal groups, inhabited the Southern Plains well prior to the removal of the southeastern tribal nations. The U.S. government first treatied what is now Iowa land to the Muscogee Creek in 1825, and this treaty included the land on which our institution, OSU, now sits in Stillwater, OK.
OSU, as an example of the relationship between higher educational institutions and settler colonial processes, is a land-grant university—an institution created by the U.S. federal government granting previously treatied Indigenous lands to states. Within a decolonial framework, scholars understand treaties as highly contested and generally signed under duress. Indigenous peoples understand treaties as a tool for stealing lands and resources. Under the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, states used these stolen lands to establish educational institutions. Sharon Stein and Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti remark that “Today higher education institutions continue to reproduce an epistemological hierarchy wherein Western knowledges are presumed to be universally relevant and valuable, while non-Western knowledges are either patronizingly celebrated as ‘local culture,’ commodified or appropriated for Western gain, or else not recognized as knowledge at all” (371). As a telling marker of this appropriation, the Department of English at OSU is housed in Morrill Hall, named after the law as one of the first buildings built on the campus. With our decolonial project, one of our goals was to reappropriate stolen resources for the Indigenous communities still living with the consequences of this history.
These intersections create a complex context for us to navigate as community-engaged scholars developing a decolonial project. They also render intricate intersections and a troubled narrative to articulate in an installation that represents the project. Yet, by honoring, speaking, and confronting the complex history and ongoing consequences of settler colonialism, we meet the primary markers of decolonial theory and research methodology, as well as decolonial curation. Ivan Muñiz-Reed remarks that “a decolonial curatorial practice would advocate for an epistemic disobedience, replacing or complementing Eurocentric discourses and categories with alternative perspectives” (101). To work toward decoloniality means entering the initially disorienting logics of multiple, co-existing epistemologies. Decoloniality requires more than the repatriation of Indigenous lands to Indigenous peoples; it requires new perspectives and voices, new ways of seeing and listening. It necessitates a willingness to be confused and uncomfortable because it is new, and new generates pathways out of the old colonial model.
Non-linearity, Decoloniality, and New Directions
Our website presents our work and experience to the audience in a non-linear way rather than in a hierarchical, linear manner. Visitors can choose the direction which with they wish to begin, ultimately engaging uniquely with the Prayer and Process pairings for all seven directions. We decided on a non-linear presentation of the piece for three reasons. First, linearity is key to colonial logic. From time to space to social relations, colonialism enacts and values a linear paradigm that structures western identity and epistemology and justifies exploitation, oppression, and violence in the name of progress and advancing civilization. Vine Deloria, Jr. states,
Western European peoples have never learned to consider the nature of the world discerned from a spatial point of view. And a singular difficulty faces peoples of Western European heritage in making a transition from thinking in terms of time to thinking in terms of space. The very essence of Western European identity involves the assumption that time proceeds in a linear fashion; further it assumes that at a particular point in the unraveling of this sequence, the peoples of Western Europe became the guardians of the world. (62)
This Western European and colonial paradigm enforces notions of “progress” and “advancement”—a linearity that, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith notes, positions colonialism as a move out of the “dark ages” that “could be ‘measured’ in terms of technological advancement and spiritual salvation. Progress is evolutionary and teleological and is present in both liberal and Marxist ideas about history” (55). As such, we want our project to promote non-linear interaction, hopefully fostering various sets of arguments and experiences among visitors, depending on choices they make while enacting decolonial thinking and doing. Walter Mignolo comes to mind stating, “A linear argument cannot capture the nuances, since once a name or a paragraph is mentioned or quoted in a linear flow, it does not return: repetitions are not good in English composition but are important in decolonial thinking” (xxiii). While we do not necessarily have repetitions in the way Mignolo structures his book The Darker Side of Western Modernity, after experiencing all the directions, visitors will notice returns to multiple themes and resonances between them.
Second, our seven directions of the project are not vertically or horizontally valued, rather they are situated within a spherical graphic that values a land-based perspective. That is, each direction of the installation has a value not only in and of itself, but also multiple meanings in relation to the other directions regardless of the order in which one engages with them. We believe our arrangement further emphasizes decoloniality by drawing attention to connections and relationships which often proceed in multiple directions at once.
Third, we want our piece to reflect the experience of entering a curated space (in contrast to traditional academic articles where most readers begin with the introduction and end with the conclusion). We used digital affordances because they allowed us to create the interactive, spherical “sacred directions image,” which served as the entrance into the space of the project. The colors we chose to represent the sacred directions of Juganawv’i/South (white), Juhyvdlv’i/North (blue), Wudeligv’i/West (yellow), and Dikalvgv’i/East (brown) come from Building One Fire: Art and Worldview in Cherokee Life, a publication of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. We selected the colors for Galvladidla/Up (purple) and Eladidla/Down (green) for personal and aesthetic reasons. We selected red to represent Ayehli/Center as a reference to the sacred fire that occupies the middle of Cherokee and Muscogee Creek ceremonial grounds. We acknowledge that there are several interpretations of the seven directions, and that those interpretations use different colors to represent them.
Ultimately, this multimodal installation curates digital pieces we created during the process of working with an Indigenous community on Indigenous and settler colonial lands to sustain cultural knowledge. In selecting, creating, and arranging these pieces, we have chosen to foreground decoloniality, particularly our own experiences with the process of decolonization as individuals and as colleagues working together on a university-sponsored project with the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma. We believe the pieces we have selected illustrate the experience of decolonization necessary for community-engaged work in Indigenous contexts. We have chosen to arrange the pieces according to the seven sacred directions acknowledged by both Cherokee and Muscogee Creek cultures, among others. These brief cultural explanations of each direction (listed below) are based upon information given to us by our Cherokee language teacher, Charles Foster. They are not arranged in order of importance.
Ayehli (Center, Where We Are Now) – the place/space we occupy, the center of everything; also the word used for “nation” (in reference to the Cherokee Nation) and the word used for “half” (in reference to time as in half-passed the hour).
Galvladidla (Up) – associated with the “upper world” or spiritual world, the sun, light, life, order, the heavens, and heavenly beings.
Eladidla (Down) – associated with the “below world” (also a spiritual realm), the moon, darkness, death, chaos, water, powerful beings, and water creatures.
Juhyvdlv’i (North) – the place where it is cold; according to Cherokee stories and oral histories, the Cherokee migrated from the north; also associated with U.S. Republicans after the Civil War.
Juganawv’i (South) – the place where it is warm; the location of Cherokee original homelands according to written history; also associated with U.S. Democrats after the Civil War.
Dikalvgv’i (East) – the place where it (the Sun) rises.
Wudeligv’i (West) – the place where it (the Sun) sets.
The following section briefly describes the associations between the directions and their respective section titles in the installment. We have arranged them here listing the cardinal directions first, moving counterclockwise from the south, which is consistent with Cherokee epistemology. Cherokees, as well as Muscogee Creeks, believe counterclockwise rotations bring balance to a clockwise world. We list the final three directions (down, up, and center) in the opposite order of the list above, again to evoke balance.
Juganawv’i (South) indicates the southern location of the Iowa tribal complex in relation to OSU, where we are institutionally positioned. In Juganawv’i, we present our visit to the complex to meet with the Ioway Tribal Librarian, as well as our first encounter together with the map credited to No Heart of Fear (also referred to as No Heart), a historical Iowa tribal leader. The juxtaposition of this map with a current United States map creates a disorientation, a decolonizing topography of settler colonialism.
Dikalvgv’i (East) tells a story about our visit to the Muscogee Creek Council Oak tree in Tulsa, Oklahoma—a location east of the Iowa tribal complex and OSU. The Council Oak marked a central location for diplomatic meetings and ceremony among the Muscogee Creek villages after removal. East is also the direction of the Muscogee Creek original homelands in the southeastern United States prior to removal. The video shows the Morning Prayer sculpture and eight interpretive plaques adjacent to the Oak, the tree itself, and the stickball field and statues memorialized across the street from the tree.
Juhyvdlv’i (North) reflects the geographical position of the OSU campus in relation to the Iowa tribal complex. The media and placard foreground issues we experienced with the OSU IRB process and the IRB committee’s response to our initial application. We layer a screen recording of the Google Drive folder (that houses our IRB materials) with historical photographs of OSU after the 1889 Oklahoma land run to link OSU’s historical presence on the land to present-day research committee oversight.
Wudeligv’i (West) presents Rachel’s work with the Kiowa Talk project, a living digital archive of Kiowa language and culture, as a model for the project that we co-envisioned with the Iowa. The Kiowa community with whom Rachel works is located in Anadarko, a small town in western Oklahoma. The video demonstrates the kiowatalk.org website, while the audio includes recordings of Kiowa Elder Dorothy Whitehorse DeLaune singing the “Resistance Song,” as well as a much older archival recording of the song. The paired audio suggests the persistence enacted by sustaining cultural knowledge despite settler colonialism.
Eladidla (Down) overlays territorial maps spanning the course of about ninety years (1820-1906), visualizing the rich, complicated, settler colonial history of Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. The video of these maps displays U.S.-imposed tribal jurisdictions and treaty dates, as well as the infamous Oklahoma land runs that began in 1889. The video presents the name and treaty date of each tribe removed or contained in Indian Territory at a five-second pace. This pacing and chronological linearity, which feels quick for those encountering the information for the first time, symbolizes the violence and speed of forced relocation and assimilation for Indigenous peoples. The audio silence of the video represents the silencing of Native American perspectives in U.S. settler colonial history.
Galvladidla (Up) represents a January 2019 meeting between Rachel, Phil, and the Iowa Tribal Librarian to target specific project goals for the spring semester. At that meeting, the librarian suggested, and together we decided, to submit a two-page formal proposal to the Iowa Tribal Council to request their consent for the digital archiving project. The audio for the video comes from an archival recording of Iowa Elder Franklin M. Murray (c. 1977) teaching an Iowa language class using his own dictionary. The recording represents historic efforts to sustain the language in the midst of settler colonial force and assimilation policy.
Ayehli (Center, Where We Are Now) presents our relationship to this land, this project, and to each other by metaphorically returning to No Heart’s map and the centrality of rivers. The video includes screen recordings and audio recordings of our conversations and travels to different rivers during and after spring 2019 flooding across Oklahoma. Together, the images and audio focus on embodiment, land-based rhetorics, and relationality as reflections on the process of doing community-engaged work on Indigenous land with Indigenous people.
On Sacred Ground
In choosing to pair each piece with one of the sacred directions, we hope to provide a decolonial orientation to the installation that disorients the viewer and thereby enables new relationships between multiple meanings. Our project takes up these multiple meanings—not by providing answers, but by opening space for possibilities, limitations, imagination, and more questions. Our project is less about critical analysis or critique, which, to remember, “is necessary for noting the contours of colonial logics but it is insufficient for imagining into existence praxes that decolonize” (Patel 3). Rather, our project and our installation foreground decolonial inventions and interventions, nascent makings, and slow processes. We think of this multimodal installation as a practice of learning—an invitation to generatively engage with the unknown and imagine decolonial possibilities—in the way Leigh Patel describes:
Learning is fundamentally a fugitive, transformative act. It runs from what was previously known, to become something not yet known. Terrifying and beautiful. Education, for centuries, within the grip of coloniality, has sought to make this essential aspect of humanness, learning and changing, definitively known. In its fundamental unknowability, learning can remind us of the limits of coloniality. (6)
This installation invites viewers to learn with us in this project as we work toward Indigenous futures.
Works Consulted
Rather than only provide citations for work that we directly cite or summarize with a parenthetical citation, we also include additional sources that inspired or shaped us while developing this project.
“The 1837 Ioway Map.” The Office of the State Archaeologist, Learn About Iowa’s Past, Maps, Material Culture, and Memory: On the Trail of the Ioway, The University of Iowa. https://archaeology.uiowa.edu/1837-ioway-map. Accessed 8 February 2019.
“1891, Stillwater selected as college site.” OSU Timeline: A history of Oklahoma State University. http://timeline.okstate.edu/. Accessed 26 May 2019.
“1892, Four frame buildings.” OSU Timeline: A history of Oklahoma State University. http://timeline.okstate.edu/. Accessed 26 May 2019.
“1893, Students join in the land run.” OSU Timeline: A history of Oklahoma State University. http://timeline.okstate.edu/. Accessed 26 May 2019.
“1893, Theta Pond was a watering hole for horses.” OSU Timeline: A history of Oklahoma State University. http://timeline.okstate.edu/. Accessed 26 May 2019.
“1896, Boardwalk to town.” OSU Timeline: A history of Oklahoma State University. http://timeline.okstate.edu/. Accessed 26 May 2019.
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Cushman, Ellen. “Wampum, Sequoyan, and Story: Decolonizing the Digital Archive.” College English, Special Issue on “The Digital Humanities and Historiography in Rhetoric and Composition,” vol. 76, no. 2, 2013, pp. 115-135.
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Foster, Charles. Personal Interview. 8 June 2019.
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Goins, Charles Robert, and Danney Goble. Historical Atlas of Oklahoma. 4th ed. U of Oklahoma P, 2006.
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Kovach, Margaret. Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts. U of Toronto P, 2009.
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“Map of the Indian and Oklahoma Territories.” OK – Docs Maps. Digital Collections, Oklahoma State University. https://cdm17279.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/OKMaps/id/3673. Accessed 6 June 2019.
Maracle, Lee. Oratory: Coming to Theory. Gallerie Publications, 1990.
Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Duke UP, 2011.
Miller, Jay. Personal Interview. 22 July 2019.
Murray, Franklin. “Franklin M. Murray-Language Introduction.” Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma Language, 1977. Archives of the Iowa Tribal Library. http://bahkhoje.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Franklin-M.-Murray-An-Original-Ioway-Speaker-1896-1983-First-Ioway-Dictionary-created-by-him.pdf. Accessed 1 May 2019.
Murray, Franklin. Audio files. Archives of the Iowa Tribal Library. https://www.bahkhoje.com/government/library/. Accessed 15 January 2019.
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Muñiz-Reed, Ivan. “Thoughts on Curatorial Practices in the Decolonial Turn.” Decolonizing Art Institutions, special issue of On Curating, no. 35, December 2017, pp. 99-105.
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Patel, Leigh. Decolonizing Educational Research: From Ownership to Answerability. Routledge, 2016.
Patton, Lori D. “Disrupting Postsecondary Prose: Toward a Critical Race Theory of Higher Education.” Urban Education, vol. 51, no. 3, 2016, pp. 315-342.
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